


Both Sides Now

by slinden



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: F/M, Time Travel Fix-It, more tags to come
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-01-12
Updated: 2020-01-12
Packaged: 2021-02-27 06:00:59
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,305
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22232185
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/slinden/pseuds/slinden
Summary: Split between three timelines, Rey tries to right what's wrong. A TROS fix-it fic (with some TNG All Good Things vibes).
Relationships: Kylo Ren/Rey, Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Comments: 5
Kudos: 18





	Both Sides Now

Chewie huffed and Poe just set his head down in the sand, grinding the back of his skull into the uncomfortable warmth. “Yeah, but what am I supposed to do? We don’t have the part so we’re fixing it like we have to fix it.”

Grumbling, Chewie at least sounded like he accepted the argument even though he moved to the other side of the ship to get away from him.

Two weeks.

They were supposed to be on Tatooine for a day. Two days at max. Now, they were still there, stuck on the fringes of the worthless moisture farm that Rey wanted to land at and it had been two weeks since he’d seen anything but sand and dust and even more sand.

He wished he could say that his trigger finger was itchy but it wasn’t. The war was over. The First Order was done and the galaxy was sorting itself out. He’d left good people in charge but he still felt like his voice in all of it was being lost and drowned out.

And he was stuck on an outer rim world, helping someone set up a moisture farm.

Fat waste of his time because she _hated_ him.

He groaned at the underside of the _Falcon_ and sat up. “Okay, you know what? Maybe we can go in to town today? It will be fun, right? You, me, and Rey? We can barter for a part and then hit the cantina?”

Chewie was standing at the other end of the ship, and he looked like he was going to go either way. Stay, go. Stay, go. It was all the same to the Wookie, Poe thought.

“Well?” he asked. “I can only deal with sand for so long before I start going a little nuts.”

Two weeks in the desert would do that to a person.

But Rey hadn’t seemed to be affected by it.

She’d been distant and dizzy, ignoring everything else that was happening everywhere else. Poe had somewhere to be, something to do. He could hang out on Tatooine for a couple of days but when the ship started to show signs that it couldn’t even take off again, it all turned in to being stuck there. Rey had done her thing. It was over. It was all done. All he wanted to do was go home but home was _nowhere_ so why did it matter?

He swallowed and rubbed his face, reading Chewie’s silence as being a _stop talking_ moment.

All Poe wanted to do was to go anywhere as fast as he could. But until the ship was fixed, they were stuck there.

He hated to admit it, but he needed Rey’s help.

She needed to stop repairing the ancient and broken vaporators like they were going to stay there forever. He had places to go and people to see. The lie was good enough for him, it should be good enough for her.

He looked up at the horizon and sighed. Heat made him itchy and this entire planet was just heat. Sticky, itchy warmth that crawled up his neck and made it hard to sleep. No one good ever ended up on Tatooine. Rey had seemed to pick the worst place in the galaxy to settle her ghosts and that’s where they were stuck until they got the proper routers to the filter for the hyperdrive activator.

Sighing, Poe rubbed his eyes. He just wanted to blow something up.

But peace meant never doing that again.

Okay, well, then he just wanted to go back and be in charge of something. Yeah, that. That he could live with.

Hard boots broke into the sand and he craned his neck to see what was happening. Rey was striding up the dune from the homestead to the _Falcon_ with a mission. Maybe she was willing to finally pitch in and help out. Maybe she was done pretending like they were going to stay there forever.

“…the date?”

Poe squinted at her. “What? The date between you and me because that can happen…”

Rey scoffed as she finished climbing the hill. She exhaled and fixed her hair, but still knelt next to him. Even though her eyes were furious, he kind of maybe still had a chance. “ _No_. What…what day is it? The date.”

He looked over at Chewie and he shrugged as well. “I don’t know. The day after yesterday?”

“Don’t be so dense.”

“Fine,” he answered and grit his teeth. “It’s 35 ABY. Third cycle, mid day. It’s Benduday. Ask BB8 if you still don’t trust me.”

“So I’m in the future,” Rey muttered, shifting in the sand and turning away from him. “And I still know you.”

“What are you talking about? Future? Rey, come on. Can we get the go ahead to get the part we need and go? You’ve been gone for so long and we’re…” he started rambling and got a glare that made him snap his mouth shut.

Rey sighed and shook her head. “I was just somewhere else. Somewhere else in time. And now I’m here so I don’t know what that means. But I know the end so I can start to make things right again.”

“What things? Like, the things to get us off of this shithole?” he asked, trying to get her to not look so serious.

But Rey kept that look on her face. “I don’t know right now. Maybe it was just a dream. Maybe I need sometime to think about this.”

“What like another day or two?”

She sucked in a breath and nodding, standing from the sand. She looked spaced out, like she’d just seen a planet explode or something. Still, he didn’t judge her for the far-off look. They all had demons to hunt down and kill in the aftermath of a war that they never thought would end. He watched her eyes, how they settled on the horizon. He’d cut off his foot to know what she was thinking. “It was like, when I woke up, I was back on Jakku, before any of this started. And it was normal. I was there and I was still _me._ Like, the old me. I didn’t know the Force. I didn’t know you or Finn, or Luke or Leia or…him. And then when I went to sleep, I woke up on Ahch-To. And I knew the Force but it didn’t know me. It was like it was still a stranger to me, and he was still in my head. What does this mean?”

He chewed on his lip and then shrugged. “I guess it means you shouldn’t trust your dreams?”

Pursing her lips, Rey shook her head. “As if you would ever understand.”

She pushed up from the sand and brushed the grit from her pants. She took off towards the dune as he stammered a response.

“So are we going or staying? Rey? Rey?” he called, getting up to shout at her. “We can’t stay here forever!”

She looked up, frowning at him from where she stood on the edge of the sand. “I think the Force just showed me a different way to find forever. I think that…I think…when was the first time we met?”

He brushed his hand over his face. “After Crait. On the _Falcon_. That was a stupid question and I’m the master of being dense but Rey…"

“No,” she shook her head and answered. “No. _This time_ we meet on Jakku.”

“What do you mean this time? Rey, come on.”

She turned away with the type of determination that he only saw from new recruits who hadn’t been broken by the world.

As she stomped down the dune, he slumped back to the ground.

What the hell was wrong with her?

**Author's Note:**

> I'm jumping the gun here and posting this knowing that I won't be able to update for a while. But here it is. I threatened to do this months ago on Twitter so I guess we all have to live with it now.


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